Best Practice Clarification: Custom Forms & the Default Mail messa

[Jay]

Hello, we are looking for some guidance about possibly using a custom form
for the default new mail message in Outlook. We would like to add a custom
field so folks can enter a project number underneath the subject line and
search for it later - based on these posts & information found this seems
easy enough to do. We are using Exchange 2007 with Outlook 2007 and when
someone clicks 'new message' the thought was to provide a custom form with
this additional field.

However, my question is if this is a best practice and supported? It seems
there are conflicting posts or possibly different scenarios in which this
should or should not be done. I have followed the following link and seen
this site reference many times
(http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=39) where it states this should
not be done but this seems to be one of the few places documenting this. My
concern is implementing something that may work now, only to fail later on
after a Service Pack or version migration.
Any guidance with reference to additional information or other suggestions
would be appreciated Thank you.

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

The information at outlookcode.com is correct. A custom replacement for a
mail form is OK internally within an organization where everyone would be
using the custom form. However, when sending outside of the organization
there are all sorts of problems.

A better approach would be to use a COM addin that runs within Outlook and
that creates custom UI, in this case a ribbon tab with a control to add your
desired information, or a custom ribbon control on an existing ribbon tab.
That way the information is there just as it would be for the approach you
suggest but the normal email form is used so outsiders won't have a problem
with received emails, and they won't get those Winmail.dat attachments.

An alternative would be to use a form region, possibly an adjoining region
that allows entry of your information but also ends up as a normal form when
sent outside the organization. That could be without a COM addin if all you
want is the data, or in conjunction with a COM addin if you need to add
business logic along with the data entry.

Either of the 2 approaches I mentioned would be considered as better
practices than a custom form.